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The European Social Stack
- jruohonen 4mo agoGood luck, but I am not sure about the direction. I mean, for a while, I thought something like Substack (and not Fediverse) could disturb things a little, but I suppose it and many others have already been killed by slop. So, if you do verified identity management, which is good for certain purposes but perhaps not for others, I suppose you should also do decentralized trust management, and with an ability to delete nodes from a personal but federated trust chain. (And feel free to adopt the idea also for science; it would be very much needed.)
- neves 4mo ago[dead]
- eurocratmindset 4mo ago[flagged]
- simianwords 4mo agoEurope should make a dating app. Here’s why: monetising dating apps is really hard and companies don’t seem to be doing well with it. Having a competitor here to bumble or hinge that is free and doesn’t care about short term monetisation would be a good thing.
- ben_w 4mo agoMeh. Best thing for dating apps is probably for them to cease to exist. Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created, even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls. Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people. >even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls. Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you. >Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner. It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
- ben_w 4mo ago> Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people. And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share. Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day. > Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you. Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that. > Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app. > While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
- fp64 4mo agoWhy do you think a government should compete on a market segment? I find it slightly irritating. Let me get a cup of the good EU coffee! I like the "privacy" blend the most! Now let me turn on my EU computer and log-in with my EU id Check my messages on EU social media and then I have to leave for work Oh that's a cute girl that messaged me on EU dating I hope she also likes privacy and democracy Now into my EU car, let me quickly stop at my EU charging station Power is cheap, no middleman, all EU for our democracy And then I'm on my way to my EU employer!
- simianwords 4mo agoWhat do you rather prefer, guy
- baka367 4mo agoAs long as E2E encryption is not guaranteed and we rely on id verification, the only thing this can do is to limit the 3rd parties that can easily access your data. Everything else is in the air
- h05sz487b 4mo agoPerfect is the enemy of the good. Anything is better than the oligarchs systems.
- 9dev 4mo agoI'm all in favour of the EU finally emancipating itself from American tech companies, but trying to recreate Social Media, just in a European way, is the worst possible way to go. We need less Social Media, not an inferior clone of TikTok or Instagram. Gaia-X would have been a nifty project, if it weren't a committee designing a framework for designing committee design frameworks by committee. We seem to make this mistake way too often. Don't plan to build Neuschwanstein—start to build a humble wooden cabin, and expand from there.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoMaking people less addicted to social media, or creating other versions of social media that are less harmful, might be the "harm reduction" discussion/tradeoff of our modern times, but they're very different goals and ambitions. Sure, I agree, people shouldn't spend hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok/Instagram/Whatever, but most likely they will, regardless of what we do. So, why not come up with some alternative that kind of gives them that experience, but not as addicting and with maybe more user choice, like Bluesky letting people chose their own recommendation algos they like?
- TulliusCicero 4mo agoI think there's space for less crappy social media. The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.
- 9dev 4mo agoI'm pretty sure Pandora's box has already been opened. The youth spending hours on TikTok every day is not going to go back to early days of Facebook on their own.
- mawadev 4mo agoAny software engineering done in germany is so bureaucratic. You cannot start small, you have to create the EierlegendeWollmilchSau that handles all edge cases, all security constraints and privacy concerns, use the latest architecture buzzwords and needs to be meticulously documented... Most projects turn into Stuttgart 21 within a year
- shinobi-apps 4mo ago[dead]
- throwaway13337 4mo agoEngagement metrics fed into recommendations algorithms are the paperclip maximizers that feed humanity's collective poison. Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall. Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer. Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now. We need to get specific about the real issue.
- stephen_cagle 4mo agoDo you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?
- throwaway13337 4mo agoLike all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common. Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach. Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer. Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people. The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
- dzink 4mo agoKeep the Social, ditch the media.
- neilv 4mo agoWouldn't hurt to also use European DNS TLDs.
- glutamate 4mo ago> Europe is a union of 27 sovereign nations I guess the Swiss, British, Norwegians, Albanians etc etc are not welcome to participate in this project. EDIT: In any case this whole thing is stupid. Open source and privacy matters, not country of origin.
- marginalia_nu 4mo ago> Strengthening democracy > Europe is in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; our elections and political life are under direct attack from foreign agents who use social media to manipulate public opinion and centre the political agenda to undermine us. We are deploying systems that have editorial pluralism and FIMI monitoring built in to shield our polity from influence and make our democracy resilient under attack. I just wish there'd be more of a acknowledgement about the very real democratic deficit in the EU, where multiple elections are overloaded and affect different widely disparate affairs, leading to much of the EU largely able to operate completely without fear of repercussions from its citizenship. Strengthening democracy must start at an institutional level. As of right now, there is just no real way for a European citizen to hold anyone accountable for something like Chat Control. Parliament, where you get a say, is mostly already opposed to it. The council and comission are de facto untouchable.
- maxdo 4mo agoOh well for that you have to ban TikTok first , that directly affect your politics . But that will upset new owners of Europe . All these companies are just a new way of money laundering with a proud word sovereignty
- jstummbillig 4mo agoHere is an idea for a EU product: Build something that is great, and make it so good, that everyone, including US citizens, will want to use it. Your ethics can still be great, but don't make me feel like your product won't be. If you have to market "Europe" or privacy it probably won't be.
- wqaatwt 4mo agoThat doesn’t work when the incumbents are so entrenched. You’d need to go the Chinese route and just ban everything to give the full market to domestic alternatives.
- ftmootnomoat 4mo ago[flagged]
- kingofmen 4mo agoIndeed they do. And as a result they have rather more of it than European busybodies. :)
- ftmootnomoat 4mo ago[flagged]
- 1123581321 4mo agoStay where? Successful and helpful?
- tomhow 4mo agoIf you're going to use the word, just type the word. We don't need grawlix here. But also, don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deadbabe 4mo ago
- alentred 4mo agoI suppose social.eu was taken, because it would make more sense.
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo ago> Strengthening democracy Ah yes, there it is. We‘ve learned how to translate this in our heads.
- fschuett 4mo agoJu vill accept your EU Government ID tracking and ju vill like it! Or else!
- personomas 4mo ago[dead]
- sneak 4mo agoNothing about matrix or xmpp is “ideal”. This person knows nothing about how notifications work on iOS.
- daneel_w 4mo agoI think they focus mainly on the fact that these are federated and mature solutions. I don't know anything about Matrix but as far as XMPP/Jabber and "push notifications" go, you don't need to reveal the message, nor the sender, in the alert. Right, it's not perfect, but in my book that goes a long way for privacy.
- sneak 4mo agoYou can’t send the notification to an iOS app from a federated server. All notifications to apps on iOS must come via APNS and be delivered to APNS via mTLS with a client cert issued only to the developer/publisher of that one app. Each federated instance would need its own app.
- daneel_w 4mo agoYes. Same for FCM/Android. It's not ideal, and it's not XMPP's shortcoming, but it's livable since we don't need to reveal the who or the what. And thankfully it's up to the individual user to balance their desire for automated notifications on mobile devices against their need to keep Google and Apple out of band.
- sneak 4mo agoautomated notifications? be for real. any messaging app that doesn’t notify in realtime is DOA.
- tonymet 4mo ago> be Europe > want to host infra outside the US > write a blog post
- lou1306 4mo agoPerhaps relevant context: The EU commission just ignored the "Tech Sovereignty Package" it launched ~3 weeks ago, and explicitly referred open-source as a core element of their strategy, and endorsed W, another ATproto-based social that recently a) closed their code and b) ...had its CEO attend Davos. Make of that what you will.
- gls2ro 4mo agoAbout open source I think you missed reading the EU Open Source strategy _part_ of Tech Sovereignty Package.
- psychoslave 4mo agoAttention trap platform feel nothing like social to be frank. Now that we have LLMs to prove that it doesn't take any human direct involvement to generate epic useless conversations, that should make it all the more obvious.
- jonstaab 4mo agoTime to coin a new term, I think: "openwashing". Europe is adopting open source and open protocols, not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence. This is not what these technologies were built for; "promoting democracy" does not protect the rights of individuals. The technology listed is mostly federated, not radically open (like, for example, nostr). In particular, ATProto has provided the EU with the perfect opportunity to signal openness while simultaneously standing up a new walled garden in which dystopian "moderation policies" will be the norm.
- Barrin92 4mo ago>not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence good, what's wrong with that? Europe isn't a continent for Ayn Rand reading crypto bros obsessed with their individual sovereignty, collective responsibility has always been the basis of our social contract. We're not a continent for internet libertarians, if that's what you're going for you might want move to some Peter Thiel VC funded micro-nation somewhere, we don't want nostr or 'radically open' we want social technologies that facilitate democracy, human dignity and being able to defend ourselves from nations that don't care about any of it. In the German constitution we have a concept for this Wehrhafte Demokratie, 'militant democracy', building democratic tools that are able of defeating its enemies, not individual escapism.
- bluegatty 4mo agoThis thesis is undermined by the reality of operational an implementation concerns. A 'wish list' is not hugely important to the operational capability of 'doing the thing'. It's definitely a 'nice to have' and a 'starting point' from a certain angle, but it's a nominal thing really. Thinking about critical masses, requiring established social networks to have open APIs and local content etc., definitely some regulations around local hosting and even use aka 'gov entities must use European based entities' for certain things, which helps build critical mass. Etc. Also - as someone commented 'doing the things' is often 75% of the reality of this, strategic considerations make up the smaller part even if they are critical.
- clickety_clack 4mo agoThis looks so complicated. There needs to be like 2 obvious buttons to press to get anyone to do any of this.
- dutchCourage 4mo agoA lot of these principles are totally transparent for the user. For example, emails are a complex system but users can sign up to any email service and send emails regardless of which service their recipient uses. This could totally be possible for any social network, and many apps, would they be willing to implement it. The end user experience wouldn't be any more complex.
- storus 4mo ago"Europe has a strong ecosystem of social companies and a deep well of expertise in designing and operating social protocols." LOL When you start writing something, pick something more believable. It just invalidates anything you write thereafter.
- daft_pink 4mo agoIs it that easy to create a multi billion dollar tech company. The competition is fierce and many have tried. Huge companies with billions of dollars have tried to compete with Google for years. Google has spent billions to compete with Facebook. It seems very unlikely that you can just come up with this and win.
- znpy 4mo agoI've grown to dislike mastodon and similar platforms. They are a great place to harbor extremists and to let narcisistic instance admins play god. I'll take Twitter/X any day, where everybody (from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other) can have pretty much the same chance at free speech. Until Europe can't birth one such platform, I'll stay on old ones.